Andrew

Brokers face consolidating competition, shifting regional and global markets, an evolving workforce, and an increasingly discerning customer base. More than ever before, the challenge lies in developing and nurturing a business model that fosters long-term, sustainable growth. For Vantage founder and CEO Alex Panlilio and Executive Chairman Anthony Gruppo, the answer is in the sales process. Rather than being purely transactional and focused on closing, Panlilio and Gruppo contend that successful brokers are converting to a more consultative model. In this model, nurturing in-house talent, building deeper and more diversified relationships with clients, and unifying the sales and service processes is fundamental.

Gruppo outlines what he sees as the most important talent building blocks for a transactional-to-consultative conversion. “Leadership development is critical. There are a lot of organizations that don’t know the full extent and breadth of talent working for them.” Understanding employees and the talents they already possess empowers a firm to cultivate and elevate leaders from within. Another building block, tightly linked with leadership development, is mentorship programs and career planning. When newcomers join your team, they have a career path and a mentor alongside them—so you develop a bench of future leaders.

Panlilio adds “the final part of building a talent pool for the consultative model is diversity, inclusion, and accountability. The best organizations are the ones that recognize these factors. We can see a lot of correlation between business results and when leadership teams are performance-based and transparent throughout the entire organization.” Understanding the strength and complexities of diversity in your current and future team and how communication is perceived will dramatically improve the efficacy of teambuilding, talent acquisition, and client satisfaction.

In the face of consolidation, shifting markets, an evolving workforce, and increasingly varied customer demands, the brokerage business model must adapt. Vantage founder and CEO Alex Panlilio and Executive Chairman Anthony Gruppo believe that the insurance sales process can no longer be purely transactional and focused on closing, but rather that successful brokers are converting to a more consultative model that better integrates sales and services.

Panlilio states “you have to make sure service doesn’t become the stepchild of your sales process. It’s probably even more important than sales—what good is getting a new client if you lose them after a year? But if you have high retention, there’s a smaller hole you have to initially fill in before hitting your organic growth target the following year. And that’s really about making sure your clients are properly served. You don’t hire a broker to buy your insurance; you hire them to fight your claims and manage your risk. That’s mostly on the service side of the relationship.”

Gruppo adds “it’s an integrated system of sales and service working together, improving the relationship, and improving the product. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Why haven’t people done it? It’s because we put up a barrier between sales and service, and sometimes service people feel inferior and have drastically different fixed compensation structures.” To resolve that, Gruppo proposes that firms should work to tie compensation to both sales and service, rewarding both retention and sales. “Then,” he adds, “people are much more creative about finding new solutions. But when you put a barrier between sales and service systems and the systems don’t talk, the client suffers.”

Panlilio also believes a firm should not stop just at bringing down the barriers between sales and service; the culture and environment should enable and facilitate collaboration and transparency of appropriate information across every department in the firm. A foundational aspect of this concept, he notes, is recognizing the core functionality of each department while allowing members of each team to “cross-train” with other departments, providing them with further knowledge and context for their role. “You make better decisions when you have an expanded viewpoint of the bigger picture,” he explains.

Initiating or revising a risk management program can take time and effort – is it worth it? Helping your clients and prospects understand the value is essential to making it happen. Risk is more pervasive than ever in a world of cyber-attacks, hyper-litigation, complex regulatory requirements, and unstable financial institutions. Fear and uncertainty exist in abundance today. But risk management isn’t just about avoiding or controlling potential problems – it can also be a tool to improve morale, teambuilding, and communication. This can help to diversify your message so that it’s not all doom and gloom.

Reducing workplace injuries will be a big selling point for many clients and prospects. This can lower costs, reduce liability and litigation, and boost employee moral and an organization’s reputation. This is an easy win for manufacturers, restaurants, construction companies, and many others. But some businesses aren’t exposed to significant workplace injury risks. So it’s important to assess your clients’ pressure points and target those specifically.

Cyber risk affects us all – particularly businesses that store sensitive information. These clients could suffer immense legal and financial consequences for failing to protect their data, not to mention the damage to their reputation.

Human resources can present another area of vulnerability – hiring, termination, harassment, and other issues can create legal, financial, and reputation pain points for many organizations. How are HR staff trained to handle these and other challenges?

In a more positive light, risk management can help empower team members to better understand what problematic behaviors and infrastructure imperil them collectively and how they can improve these circumstances cooperatively. Communication, team-building, cross-training, and celebrating success can bolster morale, get more eyes on the lookout for potential issues, and foster a sense of trust and community within an organization.

Analyzing which pressure points will speak to your client or prospect is essential to sparking their interest in risk management services. Some will simply want to see how much money they can save, others will want to see the bigger picture, but either way, there’s a risk management solution to fit every organization.

Helping your property and casualty producers to work closely with your employee benefits producers offers a wide variety of advantages. In some agencies, these producers can be isolated or even competitive, when in reality they stand much more to gain from collaborating. Let’s take a look at the methods and advantages of building this framework.

Cross-selling is one of the simplest and most obvious advantages to P&C and EB producer collaboration. Many clients who have been happy with their property and casualty coverage might be inclined to obtain employee benefits through the same agency, or vice-versa. The leads are warm and the sales cycles tend to be shorter.

This leads to another advantage – customer service and the deepening of client relationships. When your agency has a fuller picture of the needs and priorities of your clients, and more of your team is in contact with them, you have more agency to meet (or exceed) their expectations.

Internally, when producers feel encouraged to work together, customer service tends to improve and employee morale goes with it. While commissions may go to only one or two people for a given sale, the agency as a whole thrives when any team member closes a deal. Offering a wider range of services to clients and showing them that your agency works in unison inspires confidence and pushes the conversation in a stronger direction. Instead of value-adds or afterthoughts, integrating service offerings early in the process will set expectations that your agency is prepared to deliver whatever the client needs, leading to bigger opportunities immediately or down the road.

Encouraging your producers to collaborate, especially across product lines, can open many doors for your agency. Ready to learn more? Get in touch!

New producers enjoy the energy and enthusiasm of meeting people and trying things they haven’t encountered before. But they also face daunting challenges, from building professional relationships with clients, prospects, and colleagues, to learning the social and technical aspects of describing and advocating for how they can support their client’s business.

More experienced producers can help jumpstart this process by mentoring new producers in a variety of ways. From making introductions to discussing the sales and relationship-building processes, this mentoring program will make new producers effective more quickly, benefiting the agency as a whole. But it can take the mentors time and effort to accomplish this when they could be working to increase their commissions. So it’s imperative to make the mentorship program work for everyone. This might entail bonuses or extra vacation time or other incentives for mentors.

Producer mentorship, like any workplace program, needs attention to thrive. Regular check-ins with both mentor and mentee are essential to evaluating the effectiveness of the mentor, the quality of the bond and the working relationship, the teamwork potential of the mentee, and more. This not only serves to enhance and support the mentorship program, but really the workplace as a whole, helping to acquire insight into team dynamics and potential challenges.

How does your agency pass on institutional knowledge and expertise? How do you reward and celebrate the contributions of senior team members while creating space and opportunity for newer producers to thrive? Competition in the workplace can be healthy and effective, but it must be met with a strong sense of teamwork and solidarity, not cutthroat behavior. Every producer must feel that their individual actions matter, while also understanding that the agency succeeds or fails as a team. From producer mentorship programs to teambuilding exercises and beyond, building a healthy workplace improves everyone’s experience.

Diversity is essential to a strong, creative, adaptable workplace, and it comes in many forms. Diversity includes socio-economic and ethnicity factors, gender diversity (including trans or non-binary individuals), queer people, varied nationalities and languages and academic backgrounds, neurodiversity, and more. Yet diversity exists not just in where we’ve come from, but in how we think.

How does your agency foster team diversity, including diversity of thought? Background diversity stems from recruitment and onboarding practices. How are you describing job openings? What positions are you creating? Do you have specific roles to support diversity within your HR department? Where do you advertise job openings? How and where do you conduct interviews and what criteria do you prioritize in resumes and CVs?

It’s often helpful to get an outside perspective on such matters, as it can prove difficult to identify internal challenges (diversity-oriented or otherwise). But supporting and celebrating diversity can strengthen and empower teams in any number of ways. More diverse workplaces encourage a broader and more open exchange of ideas. They help everyone learn to express themselves and feel comfortable with who they are. The less someone feels they have to hide in the workplace, the more likely you are to get the most out of them as a team member.

Fostering diversity of thought is partly about recruitment and onboarding practices, but it’s also about what you do once the team is in place. Is your leadership communicating creativity-oriented priorities? How are new ideas handled in your organization? What praise, experimentation, bonuses, promotions, or other tools do you use to reward and validate dynamic and inventive thought?

Diversity, in its many forms, helps an agency reach its full potential. Most agencies lack meaningful diversity and lack a plan to achieve or leverage it. What’s your plan?

Cyberattacks are on the rise, so it’s no surprise that cyber insurance continues to be one of the fastest growing areas in the insurance industry. For insurance agencies, there are two sides to this issue: opportunity for cyber insurance related growth, and the potential for a malicious cyberattack against their own agency website. Consider some of these cyber stats:

• The average cost of a ransomware attack was $1.85 million in 2020, doubling the year before at $761,106. (Sophos, 2021)
• Data breaches exposed 36 billion records in the first half of 2020.
• 45% of breaches featured hacking, 17% were malware related and 22% involved phishing.
• 88% of organizations worldwide experienced phishing attempts (2019).
• Between 2005 and 2020, there have been over 11,000 recorded breaches.
• The top malicious email attachment types are .doc and .dot (37%), the next is .exe (19.5%).

How can you make your insurance agency website more secure and limit your exposure to a cyberattack or breach?

The Basics

• Install SSL. This is a mandatory step for all websites!
• Update your software frequently. This includes your operating environment, coding, theme, plugins, etc.
• Use complex passwords. All passwords for all user access to your website should be complex. It’s often best to use the computer-generated passwords provided by your system.
• Educate your users. Take the time to ensure all employees and contractors understand cyber security best practices including preventing phishing emails and other hacking emails.
• Use anti-malware solutions. Invest in anti-malware solutions for ongoing scans to and prevent malicious attacks.

Advanced

• Harden your server. Server hardening is a set of techniques used to improve the security of your server. For example, you should manage server access, minimize the external footprint (including hiding key files from public view), patch vulnerabilities, restrict admin access and minimized user access permissions.
• Use parameter queries to mitigate SQL injection attacks.
• Multifactor authentication should be used for login security. MFA is an excellent addition to your security protocol, and authenticator apps like LastPass, Microsoft Authenticator, and Google Authenticator are easy to use. They reside on your smartphone and allow you to enter a 6-digit code to validate secure login.
• Add a firewall. Most hosting environments offer a firewall option, and you should take advantage of this. For example, GoDaddy offers an optional Securi firewall to help prevent hacking attempts. These are an inexpensive addition and should be a standard. Note that you will need to change your DNS A record when adding a firewall.
• Protect against XSS attacks. Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks can inject malicious JavaScript into your insurance agency web pages, which can change browser page content, or potentially steal information. The best defense is to limit how and what JavaScript is executed in the page. For example, your website can disallow the running of any non-hosted scripts (disallow inline JavaScript).
• Manually accept on-site comments. Don’t allow comments to automatically post, this cuts down on spam and script attacks.
• Use captchas. Every form should have a captcha, and in the event of cookie compliance captcha issues, create a mandatory field which requires the user to decide something. For example, 5+4=___).
• Encrypt data. If you’re capturing information of any kind, or as a general safeguard, encrypt your data while at rest.

Cross-selling is essential to the long-term success of any agency. In fact, it becomes more important with each passing year as services and risks shift and diversify. Many of your professional liability or work comp clients are now facing cyber threats and environmental hazards that they wouldn’t have imagined only a decade ago. Identifying and communicating these risk presents opportunity for your agency and value and insight for your client. Failing to do so means missing out on potential revenue, but also runs the risk of making your clients concerned that you weren’t looking out for them, or simply that an agency who anticipated their needs in other areas might be a better fit for the products you already provide.

But what does a cross-sell look like? Jumping from one product or service to another can seem abrupt, confusing, desperate, or unfocused. Transitions are important, and often the most common natural transitions hinge on pain points. If a client is asking your team how they can lower their work comp rates and you explain the elements that affect their experience modification factor, you can then explain that a similar approach applies to cyber and ask what they’re doing to lower their cyber liability rates. If a client is asking about specific coverages pertaining to a localized health problem, relating that geography-specific pain point to specific climate risks in the region can make them feel like you understand the totality of the threats they face, rather than just focusing on the ones they already pay you to handle.

Ultimately, cross-selling benefits agencies and clients alike, allowing for increased revenue, improved customer experience, and more. Helping your agents build their cross-selling skills individually and as a team can dramatically improve your outlook for years to come.